


The Importance of Being Elnor

by Thimblerig



Series: On the Decks of La Sirena [8]
Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Culture Shock, Gen, Give Elnor a Cat, Romulan ninjas oh my, Slice of Life, Vignettes, Worldbuilding, they are all a bit broken but they try
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:14:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22983115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: “You gave my name to the Tal Shiar,” he said to Picard. He had meant to wait, to find a better time, but nothing was right here. Nothing fit.“Ex,” Picard said shortly. “Ex-Tal Shiar.”“But… why?” Elnor asked, the hugeness of it building in his chest, painful and bursting.Zanni told him once, Truth is so difficult and painful, we have to practice telling it every day. But he had nothing to tell, only questions.
Relationships: Elnor & Jean-Luc Picard
Series: On the Decks of La Sirena [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634554
Comments: 26
Kudos: 100





	The Importance of Being Elnor

**Author's Note:**

> // All lore, Romulan or otherwise, was made up out of whole cloth or extrapolated from what I saw on this or other Star Trek shows. Except the phrase “behind the wind” which I totally stole from a Finn MacCool story.
> 
> // There's a brief quote from _The Three Musketeers,_ and a briefer quote from _King Lear._
> 
> // Mildly spoilery for “The Impossible Box”.
> 
> // This is told in slightly anachronic order, because that's how the emotional flow wanted to go.

“... But when Vri-yan had gone into the last room, walled in ivory and horn, and he found the last box, and opened its seventh lid, what he found was not his lover’s name… BUT DEATH.” Raffi-Musiker rested her hands on the table between them and bobbed her head so that the hair in her topknot hissed forward.

“Your accent is terrible,” Elnor said.

“Don’t I know it,” Raffi-Musiker said easily, looking up. “Never could get my tongue around the hH.” She poked her tongue out, rueful. “I get the rest of it right, Elnor, bud?”

“Yes,” he said. “But in the Qowat Milat we always end it with a stricture.”

“Of course you do,” Raffi-Musiker said smiling. She lifted her eyebrows.

“‘If you hide yourself, you lose yourself.’”

“Absolute Candour, huh?”

“Yes.”

“How’s life on the ship working out for you, Elnor?”

“I have to sleep in a separate room,” he said

Raffi-Musiker squinted her eyes. “Back at the Mother House you all laid out your bedding in the main hall, if I remember right.”

“Yes,” said Elnor, swallowing back the hurt.

“Separate sleeping areas are pretty normal for Federation spaces,” she said slowly, watching his face. “‘Specially in the cities. I’ve seen ‘em like that on Romulus, too.”

“No wonder you are all so unhappy.”

Her smile widened, with the twist in it that so many of the people here had. “Could be.” She tapped his wrist. “Your turn.”

Elnor sat tall in his chair, feet tucked under his thighs, and opened his hands to rest on them, palm up. “In the year of the broken bridges, under a sickle moon, Uo of the third generation stood behind the wind watching a funeral procession on the cliffs off -”

The Captain’s voice fell out of the air: _Raffi, my peach-blossom, can you get your skinny butt up to the Bridge? We’re sidling past a Romulan cruiser and no-one sweet-talks ‘em like you do.”_

“I could help!” Elnor said eagerly.

A pause. _We’re not in Vashti space anymore, kid._

 _He meant, You are useless,_ Elnor thought, _but I don’t want to tell you out loud._ Zanni told him often that Absolute Candour was a difficult thing, and that he should be kind to those who could not follow it. But it was hard. And it was lonely.

Raffi-musiker touched his wrist before she left, and mouthed “Later,” as she headed out the door.

* * *

”Jolan tru, Agnes.”

The woman sitting alone in the _Mess_ jumped, and the small orange-furred creature that had been on the table dashed desperately off it, almost as fast as a qalankhkai. Agnes squeaked.

“I am sorry to intrude,” Elnor said formally.

“No, you’re not butting in,” Agnes said, her fingers wrapped around a small _padd._ “I pulled that cat out of my old files for you.”

“I do not understand.” _(Butting-in,_ he repeated to himself silently. _Butting-in_ means _intruding.)_

She tapped her finger a couple of times on the _padd_ in her hand, then bent to peer under the table. A low, menacing grumble sounded from the depths. Agnes pursed her lips. “Just sit still with your feet together and ignore it.”

He did not understand her but he obeyed. Presently something pressed against his leg, small but insistent. “Put your hand down,” she mouthed, and when he did the creature’s small head pushed into it, its nose noticeably cold and damp. In a rush, the creature was on the table shoving and pressing at him, and vibrating. Agnes showed him how to stroke it and it vibrated harder.

“It’s not real,” Agnes said, tucking her hands in the pockets of her blue jacket and sitting back. “Just a cluster of behavioural algorithms with a randomiser - not even a 0.1 on the Zimmerman-Barclay scale.”

“How do you make it real?”

“With a permit,” Agnes said, her mouth in a twisted smile. “I could hive it to the ship. Even a little freighter like _La Sirena_ has brain to spare. And I could let it run continuously without memory purges so it learned from experience - but the matrix isn’t robust enough to cope for long. You’d get more and more feedback errors. It was just a student project,” she said hurriedly, “and not very good.”

“I love it,” Elnor said, stroking its side. Its eyes were large and liquid and focussed on him, heavy-lidded. It felt real. “What is its name?”

“Spot.”

“Like Data’s cat?”

“Every AI researcher names their cat Spot,” Agnes said dryly.

“Why did you make it afraid, at the start?”

“Isn’t everyone?”

* * *

“The door was open…”

Elnor set his foot uncertainly into the _Hologram_ they had made into Picard’s home on Earth - the legged furnishings, the books, the windows that showed lines of strange crops and sunshine without heat in it, and birds.

“Picard?”

The viewscreen on his liege’s desk was on, hanging like a pane of glass between the visible and invisible. It held in its uncertain surface an image of Picard as a much younger man, eyes pitiless and fierce but without heart, and his face armoured in the trappings of the Borg.

No-one ever came back, before Picard.

A light flickered on the desk, and Elnor touched it hesitantly. Picard’s lost face vanished and a Romulan woman appeared in the viewscreen, her hair wild and her eyebrows flaring out like bird’s-wings. She was clad in light coloured garments of some kind of knitted fabric and spoke in Federation Standard.

“ - only a few minutes before the encryption corridor collapses but I’m just letting you know we’ve freed up some more liquidity - it’s not like you ever liked that painting anyway…” She trailed off, blinked, and then said, “Hello, little one.”

“Oh!” Elnor set his hands in the _open book_ gesture of the Qowat Milat. “Jolan tru. I am Elnor.”

The Romulan woman stared at him.

Then she turned her head to the side and roared, “ZHABAAAN!!”

 _“Yes, my hermit crab?”_ cooed a man’s voice away from the viewscreen.

“He found Elnor!!”

 _“No, that one dropped out of the records years ago, he -”_ Something heavy dropped, out of sight, and then a man with northern looks intruded on the view, tilted in from the side.

“Hello,” the northerner said, smiling.

The knitted woman, still looking at Elnor, reached out her hand and yanked the northerner down to sit properly. She smiled also. “Hello.”

“Jolan tru,” Elnor repeated awkwardly, shaping his hands again. The knitted woman repeated the gesture, hands clumsy, then said in a rush, “You can call me Aunty Laris.”

“And Uncle Zhaban!” the northerner declared.

“Are you well? Is _he_ well?”

“Don’t let him tell you he isn’t hungry,” _Uncle_ Zhaban said. “You put the food in front of him and he eats it. Stare at him if he’s being picky.”

“I will do that!” Elnor said. “We are well. We are travelling to -”

 _Aunty_ Laris held up one hand, _stop._ “No. Don’t tell us where you’re going.” Her hands moved into two loose fists held together, then pulled apart sharply: the _hidden mouth._

Elnor stared at her hands, horrified. “You’re Tal Shiar,” he whispered.

 _Aunty_ Laris looked downwards and jumped.

 _“Were,”_ _Uncle_ Zhaban said firmly. He reached his arm across the Tal Shiar’s shoulders and pulled her in towards him. “Very much past tense.” Something flickered in his eyes, something like defiance.

“That - they don’t -” Elnor stuttered. And, “You.”

 _Aunty_ Laris frowned, looking at something a little off-screen. “We’re losing our corridor. We’ll talk again, Elnor,” she warned. And the image flickered out.

* * *

Spot the Cat might not be real but it was good company, curling up beside Elnor when he slept and vibrating for the two hours it could operate at a time. And, if he kept the _padd_ they had given him in his pocket, it would run with him in the mornings, trotting behind his heels or shooting ahead with the dash of a small child.

First he ran through the halls on the floor, and then used his speed to trip arcs up and down the walls. (The gravity was strange; it twisted at his head sometimes, but he was learning to adjust.) On the third circuit he ran behind the wind, slipping unseen through the gloom of _La Sirena,_ and even Spot the Cat following his _padd_ sometimes lost him.

Elnor turned a corner and a light was on. Spot dawdled around the feet of a man in the doorway, who peered into the darkness of the corridor, night-blind as the other humans.

“Agnes?” the Captain said unsteadily.

“No,” said Elnor, stepping out of the air and darkness. “It is I, Elnor.”

Rios let out his breath in a long sigh and rubbed the back of his wild hair. “No expectations,” he muttered to himself.

He was dressed lightly, in durable trousers that ended just below the knee. They would be good to train in, Elnor thought, and indeed, the Captain’s bare chest was touched with dry sweat, but -

“You smell of sex.”

Rios grinned crookedly. “Yeah?” He patted absentmindedly at one hip pocket.

“I always say the wrong thing,” Elnor said in a rush.

Rios ducked his head, and his smile changed and softened. “It’s fine, kid, I’m just half-awake. Not a conversationalist.” He patted his hand on Elnor’s shoulder, easy and companionable. Spot the Cat looked up at them and made a complaining sound.

“I am about to cook breakfast, will you eat with me?”

Rios hesitated, on the point of… something. “Yeah.” He reached down to pet Spot the Cat. “I’d like that.”

Elnor formed his hands into the _open book_ gesture of the Qowat Milat. ”Jolan tru, my brother.”

 _“Jolan tru,_ kid.”

Spot the Cat trotted behind them.

* * *

“Elnor?”

Picard came out of one of his inner rooms, wiping his face with a soft white towel. He forced his eyes away from the viewscreen on his desk and made a smile that Elnor thought was forced.

 _“Aunty_ Laris gives you liquid because you didn’t like a picture,” Elnor said.

“Laris never liked it in any case,” Picard said ruefully, setting the towel down, “which is perhaps more important.”

Elnor started to fold himself onto the floor.

“In my quarters you _sit on a chair,”_ Picard snapped. Elnor’s knees jerked straight.

“You gave my name to the Tal Shiar,” he said to Picard. He had meant to wait, to find a better time, but nothing was right here. Nothing fit.

“Ex,” Picard said shortly. “Ex-Tal Shiar.”

“But… _why?”_ Elnor asked, the hugeness of it building in his chest, painful and bursting.

Zanni told him once, _Truth is so difficult and painful, we have to practice telling it every day._ But he had nothing to tell, only questions.

“Because I trusted them with my heart,” Picard said simply.

“Oh.”

Something sagged in the old man, and he said, “Sit… sit wherever you are most comfortable, Elnor.” And Elnor did, kneeling in rest stance by Picard’s chair, on the right side - the place of honour and guardianship. Picard hesitated, and sat down himself, in the tall chair. “I am a foolish, fond old man,” he muttered, cancelling the viewscreen with a flick of his fingers.

“It is permitted,” Elnor said, looking straight ahead, “for the liege to tell his qalankhkai stories. If he chooses.”

“Is it now? Of what nature?”

“Whatever you please.”

“Well then.” Picard tilted his head back, half-slitted his eyes, and said from memory, “On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the bourg of Meung…”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Parable of the Wrench](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29206797) by [Thimblerig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig)




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